Chapter 1
Blood Moon Rising
Detective Rowan Sydal was awake but his eyes stubbornly refused to open.
An unpleasant prolonged machine sound was repeating over and over somewhere near his head, like a robot with a stutter. Was this what hell sounded like? If oblivion had a soundtrack, did it consist of annoying sounds for eternity?
Sydal finally managed to force his eyes slowly open. He went from darkness to overwhelming brightness as he was assaulted by fluorescent ceiling lighting. It flickered on and off. Figured, Sydal thought. So few things on the moon worked properly.
“Matthew!” Sydal tried to yell out, but his throat was dry and sore. He tried sitting up. He was in a hospital room of some kind. Every inch of his body yelled at him to stay down, using pain to prove its point. That didn’t stop him. He sat up in his bed.
Several IVs fed Sydal fluids. The hospital room was empty. A tube in his nose must have helped him breathe while he was out.
How long was I out? Where’s Matthew? What did they….no, don’t think that way. You’ll find him. You’ll get out of here and find him.
Sydal knew he had to move. Time was his enemy. His son’s trail would go cold soon. If nothing else, his job had taught him the importance of urgency.
The first thing Sydal did was rip the IVs from his arms. Then came the tube in his nose that had fed him oxygen when he was unconscious. Alarms went off on the machines around him monitoring his health. They made the previous beeping sounds seem positively therapeutic. He ignored them. He ignored everything.
If he was going to make it out of this hospital, Sydal knew he had to get out of the hospital gown and into his own clothes. He’d worked enough nasty business, homicides and worse, to know that they normally put the clothes a patient was wearing inside a bag in their room, assuming they hadn’t had to destroy his to save him. His head was groggy, and he couldn’t quite seem to remember the circumstances of his ending up here. He looked all around the room, then saw a closet with a long mirror on it.
Sydal reached to open the closet, eager to change out of his gown. That was when he saw himself in the mirror. One of his eyes was swollen. There was a big bruise on the opposite cheek. Wrapped around his head was some gauze with blood that had seeped through and stained. He had the beginnings of a beard.
How long was I out?
Sydal tried to ignore the sad sight in the mirror and continued to look inside the closet. Sure enough, hanging from a hook was a white plastic bag with the hospital’s logo on it.
As he got dressed, Sydal found it odd that he didn’t hear anything. There weren’t the voices of nurses and doctors. He didn’t hear the sound of footsteps in the hallways outside his room running to check on him. It was creepy and didn’t feel right.
Sydal, now dressed, walked across his hospital room towards the exit. He pulled down the door handle and tried to push it open. It barely budged. Something was blocking the way.
Annoyed, Sydal pushed again with more force. It took a little bit of elbow grease, but he got it open.
And he also saw what was blocking it.
A dead body—a nurse, from the look of her uniform—was slumped on the floor in front of his door. When he looked up, he saw several more bodies scattered across the hallway.
“What the hell?” he croaked through the pain and soreness in his throat.
Sydal didn’t know exactly what he’d expected to see outside his door, but he knew it wasn’t this. Maybe UEF armed guards, or Waterman-Lau security outside his room, but not death. He sat silent and still, trying to sense any movement. Nothing. He had a feeling the scene in front of his door was just the beginning, an appetizer for a hellscape to come.
He stepped carefully over the corpse and entered the hallway. It was dark. Only the light from a handful of open rooms lit it. As he walked out a little further, his shoes hit something metal.
Sydal knelt down and picked up spent shell casings. He didn’t need to be a detective to know that something bad had happened here. He pressed forward, hoping to start connecting dots.
He noticed blood smears on the walls. Many had bullet holes in the middle of them, and bodies right under them. Someone, or a group of someone’s, had come into this hospital and started shooting. With the seemingly random placement of bodies, it wasn’t done execution-style, but haphazardly. And according to the shell casings Sydal had found, military-grade weapons had been used.
When Sydal reached the end of the hall, he peeked around the corner to make sure no one was there. All he saw were dead hospital staff. A couple were still behind their desks. This death, this killing, he figured it must’ve come as a surprise. One poor bastard, a janitor by the look of it, still had his mop in his hand. His own blood mixed with the dirty mop water on the floor.
“HUD, give me the lunar news feed,” whispered Sydal as he looked around for a downed security guard. Hospitals had security guards. And security guards were usually armed. He’d feel a lot better if he had a weapon.
To Sydal’s surprise, there was no feed. There was only static. He couldn’t remember a time that that was the case. Even when there were the AIC guerrilla attacks a few years earlier, the feeds had stayed on.
“HUD, track Matthew Sydal. HUD ID #34576890.”
Sydal didn’t want to use his tracker. It ran through his department, and anyone watching would know he was active. He’d never imagined a world where he couldn’t trust his fellow cops, but right now, he didn’t trust anyone.
After a moment of accessing and approval, it brought up a search window. After a minute, it had tracked his son’s HUD implants.
“Shit…that’s not, not ideal.”
According to the tracker, Sydal’s son was smack-dab in the middle of the lunar UEF base.
Sydal took a moment to catch his breath. He took inventory of his situation. Without knowing what was going on outside the hospital, he had to assume it was just as bad as on the inside. He was unarmed; he needed a gun, a dead security guard. He needed something to drink, which shouldn’t have been that big of a problem. There had to be water, soft drinks, juices, anything he could think of somewhere in this facility. He needed something to deal with the pain, and the pounding headache making him nauseous. Once ready, he’d tackle the seemingly insurmountable task of saving his son.
If he was still alive. If he was still Matthew.
Sydal found a security guard just outside the employee break room. He, too, looked like he’d been taken unaware. The guard had a pistol with one extra magazine. Sydal pocketed both. Then he raided the cabinets and fridge in the break room, trying to ignore the dead bodies sitting at the tables. One poor doctor had been shot from behind as he was at the vending machine, his innards sprayed on the glass.
Fed, with a bag full of snacks and water bottles, Sydal was ready for the last step before leaving the hospital. Not being in the medical profession, it took him a little while to find where they stored the drugs, the good stuff. It took him even longer to figure out which to take when he did find it. But if there was any time to take a gamble, this was it.
Sydal made his way down to the hospital lobby. He wasn’t prepared for the cruelty, the results of which were all over the bottom floor. Doctors, nurses, guests, and patients were stacked up in piles.
There were no flies in the moon domes, but there were stray imported pets. Dogs, cats, and the ever-popular Dats—exotically bioengineered dog-cat hybrids, feasted on the free flesh seemingly offered up to them by some unknown benefactor.